This work is the first thorough analysis of the creative oeuvre of the Quay Brothers. Known for their animation shorts that rely on puppetry, miniatures, and stop-motion techniques, their fiercely idiosyncratic films are fertile fields for Suzanne Buchan's engaging descriptions and provocative insights into the Quays' art-and into the art of independent puppet animation.
Buchan's aesthetic investigation stems from extensive access to the Quay Brothers' artistic practices and work, which spans animation and live-action film, stage design and illustration. She also draws on a long acquaintance with them and on interviews with collaborators essential to their productions, as well as archival sources. Discussions of their films' literary origins, space, puppets, montage, and the often-overlooked world of sound and music in animation shed new light on the expressive world that the Quay Brothers generate out of their materials to create the poetic alchemy of their films.
At once a biography of the Quays' artistic trajectory and a detailed examination of one of their best-known films, "Street of Crocodiles," this book goes further and provides interdisciplinary methodologies and tools for the analysis of animation.

Honorable Mention, Latin American Studies Association Haiti-Dominican Republic Section Isis Duarte Book PrizeGathering oral stories and visual art from Haiti and two of its "motherlands" in Africa, Istwa across the Water recovers the submerged histories of the island through methods drawn from its deep spiritual and cultural traditions. Toni Pressley-Sanon employs three theoretical anchors to bring together parts of the African diaspora that are profoundly fractured because of the slave trade. The first is the Vodou concept of marasa, or twinned entities, which she uses to identify parts of Dahomey (the present-day Benin Republic) and the Kongo region as Haiti's twinned sites of cultural production. Second, she draws on poet Kamau Brathwaite's idea of tidalectics-the back-and-forth movement of ocean waves-as a way to look at the cultural exchange set in motion by the transatlantic movement of captives. Finally, Pressley-Sanon searches out the places where history and memory intersect in story, expressed by the Kreyol term istwa. Challenging the tendency to read history linearly, this volume offers a bold new approach for understanding Haitian histories and imagining Haitian futures.

As one of the unavoidable realities of human existence, death is also one of the oldest and most common themes in the history of art. From Egyptian tomb paintings and battle scenes on Greek vases by anonymous artists, to depictions of the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus by the great Renaissance masters, to contemporary encounters with these subjects by such artists as Damien Hirst and Andres Serrano, the contents of this book highlight three thousand years of the iconography of death and resurrection. While focusing on the Western artistic tradition, the book also includes many artworks from Asia, Africa, and Oceania.
De Pascale explores depictions of these two subjects thematically, through chapters on violent death, ceremonial tributes to the departed, allegorical depictions of death, and the journey to the afterlife. The book concludes with an examination of symbolic representations of the victory of life over death.
see page 187, FALL 08 CATALOG, for style]
Also in the series:
The History of the Church in Art
978-0-89236-936-2
$24.95 (03), paperback
Food and Feasting in Art
978-0-89236-914-0
$24.95 (03), paperback
Astrology, Magic, and Alchemy in Art
978-0-89236-907-2
$24.95 (03), paperback
Gardens in Art
978-0-89236-885-3
$24.95 (03), paperback
Artists' Techniques and Materials
978-0-89236-860-0
$24.95 (03), paperback
Icons and Saints of the Eastern Orthodox Church
978-0-89236-845-7
$24.95 (03), paperback
Angels and Demons in Art
978-0-89236-830-3
$24.95 (03), paperback
Symbols and Allegories in Art
978-0-89236-818-1
$24.95 (03), paperback
Old Testament Figures in Art
978-0-89236-745-0
$24.95 (03), paperback
Nature and Its Symbols
978-0-89236-772-6
$24.95 (03), paperback
Gospel Figures in Art
978-0-89236-727-6
$24.95 (03), paperback
Saints in Art
978-0-89236-717-7
$24.95 (03), paperback
Gods and Heroes in Art
978-0-89236-702-3
$24.95 (03), paperback

A delightful gift book, celebrating the dogs in Tate's collection Following Tate's recent publication Love, this new selection of works showcases the most endearing, thoughtful, and amusing depictions of dogs drawn from Tate's collection. Divided into key themes--"Hounds of the Hunt," "Painterly Pooches," "Princely Pups," "Man's Best Friend," "Moping Mutts," "Working Like a Dog," "Lap Dogs at Leisure," "Mystical Mutts," and "Loyal Fido"--this little book considers how dogs have been the animal companion of choice for millennia and how their position as hunter, signifier of status, and friend has influenced artists. Works of art--including paintings, drawings, sculptures, illustrations, and installations--are introduced by a brief introduction text at the beginning of the chapter, adding background detail or additional information about the art, artists, and their subjects. Featured artists include: Edwin Henry Landseer, Sidney Nolan, Chris Killip, Giacomo Amiconi, Hamo Thornycroft, William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, Cedric Morris, Peter Doig, and Edward Ruscha. Sometimes traditional, sometimes contemporary, often touching and occasionally telling, placed together these beautiful images create a fascinating and enlightening journey through the visual portrayal of canines in Western art.

After the death of Joseph Stalin, Soviet-era Russia experienced a flourishing artistic movement due to relaxed censorship and new economic growth. In this new atmosphere of freedom, Russia's satirical magazine Krokodil (The Crocodile) became rejuvenated. John Etty explores Soviet graphic satire through Krokodil and its political cartoons. He investigates the forms, production, consumption, and functions of Krokodil, focusing on the period from 1954 to 1964. Krokodil remained the longest-serving and most important satirical journal in the Soviet Union, unique in producing state-sanctioned graphic satirical comment on Soviet and international affairs for over seventy years. Etty's analysis of Krokodil extends and enhances our understanding of Soviet graphic satire beyond state-sponsored propaganda. For most of its life, Krokodil consisted of a sixteen-page satirical magazine comprising a range of cartoons, photographs, and verbal texts. Authored by professional and nonprofessional contributors and published by Pravda in Moscow, it produced state-sanctioned satirical comment on Soviet and international affairs from 1922 onward. Soviet citizens and scholars of the USSR recognized Krokodil as the most significant, influential source of Soviet graphic satire. Indeed, the magazine enjoyed an international reputation, and many Americans and Western Europeans, regardless of political affiliation, found the images pointed and witty. Astoundingly, the magazine outlived the USSR but until now has received little scholarly attention.

A fascinating look at artistic experiments with televisual forms. Following the integration of television into the fabric of American life in the 1950s, experimental artists of the 1960s began to appropriate this novel medium toward new aesthetic and political ends. As Erica Levin details in The Channeled Image, groundbreaking artists like Carolee Schneemann, Bruce Conner, Stan VanDerBeek, and Aldo Tambellini developed a new formal language that foregrounded television's mediation of a social order defined by the interests of the state, capital, and cultural elites. The resulting works introduced immersive projection environments, live screening events, videographic distortion, and televised happenings, among other forms. For Levin, "the channeled image" names a constellation of practices that mimic, simulate, or disrupt the appearance of televised images. This formal experimentation influenced new modes of installation, which took shape as multi-channel displays and mobile or split-screen projections, or in some cases, experimental work produced for broadcast. Above all, this book asks how artistic experimentation with televisual forms was shaped by events that challenged television broadcasters' claims to authority, events that set the stage for struggles over how access to the airwaves would be negotiated in the future.

Published to coincide with the imminent opening of the beautiful new art galleries at Te Papa, this book takes an intimate yet expert look at the national art collection. Ten art curators each pick ten art works and tell us why they love/admire/revere/are moved by them. It's an entirely fresh way to approach art, through the eyes of those who work with these paintings, prints, photographs, applied art objects and sculptures every day and who know them better than most.

In A Fragile Inheritance Saloni Mathur investigates the work of two seminal figures from the global South: the New Delhi-based critic and curator Geeta Kapur and contemporary multimedia artist Vivan Sundaram. Examining their written and visual works over the past fifty years, Mathur illuminates how her protagonists' political and aesthetic commitments intersect and foreground uncertainty, difficulty, conflict, and contradiction. This book presents new understandings of the culture and politics of decolonization and the role of non-Western aesthetic avant-gardes within the discourses of contemporary art. Through skillful interpretation of Sundaram's and Kapur's practices, Mathur demonstrates how received notions of mainstream art history may be investigated and subjected to creative redefinition. Her scholarly methodology offers an impassioned model of critical aesthetics and advances a radical understanding of art and politics in our time.

Our understanding of art has undergone several major upheavals in the past thirty years. Postmodernism and mass media began the process of disruption in the 1980s. The explosion in the use of digital technologies since the 1990s has radically altered the way in which art is now created, perceived and made available. The recent shift towards regarding art as part of a broader "visual culture" has torn art theory from its roots in art history and placed it in the context of anthropological, cultural and media theory. Art: Histories, Theories and Exceptions confronts these different ideas by examining a range of different approaches to art - as ritual, as a form of diagrammatic writing, as a symptom of a cultural moment, as a commodity, and as an agent of change. Art: Histories, Theories and Exceptions explores what art in its broadest sense - from Aboriginal work to the Western art market, from the role of museums to new media interactivity, from the mainstream to the radical - means today. This provocative book will be invaluable to students, practicing artists and general readers alike.

From the fluttering fabric of a tent, to the blurred motion of the potter's wheel, to the rhythm of a horse puppet's wooden hooves-these scenes make up a set of mid-1980s art exhibitions as part of the U.S. Festival of India. The festival was conceived at a meeting between Indira Gandhi and Ronald Reagan to strengthen relations between the two countries at a time of late Cold War tensions and global economic change, when America's image of India was as a place of desperate poverty and spectacular fantasy. Displaying Time unpacks the intimate, small-scale durations of time at work in the gallery from the transformation of clay into ceramic to the one-on-one, personal encounters between museum visitors and artists. Using extensive archival research and interviews with artists, curators, diplomats, and visitors, Rebecca Brown analyzes a selection of museum shows that were part of the Festival of India to unfurl new exhibitionary modes: the time of transformation, of interruption, of potential and the future, as well as the contemporary and the now.

Women have consistently been left out of the official writing of Lebanese history, and nowhere is this more obvious than in writing on the Lebanese Civil War. As more and more histories of the war begin to circulate, few include any in-depth discussion of the multiple roles women played in wartime Lebanon. Fewer still address the essential issues of women's work and their creative production, such as literature, performance art, and filmmaking. Developed out of a larger oral history project collecting and archiving the ways in which women narrated their experiences of the Lebanese Civil War, this book focuses on a wide range of subjects, all framed as women telling their "war stories." Each of the six chapters centers on women who worked or created art during the war, revealing, in their own words, the challenges, struggles, and resistance they faced during this tumultuous period of Lebanese history.

In 1990 Jacques Chirac, the future president of France and a passionate fan of non-European art, met Jacques Kerchache, a maverick art collector with the lifelong ambition of displaying African sculpture in the holy temple of French culture, the Louvre. Together they began laying plans, and ten years later African fetishes were on view under the same roof as the "Mona Lisa," Then, in 2006, amidst a maelstrom of controversy and hype, Chirac presided over the opening of a new museum dedicated to primitive art in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower: the Musee du Quai Branly.
"Paris Primitive" recounts the massive reconfiguration of Paris's museum world that resulted from Chirac's dream, set against a backdrop of personal and national politics, intellectual life, and the role of culture in French society. Along with exposing the machinations that led to the MQB's creation, Sally Price addresses the thorny questions it raises about the legacy of colonialism, the balance between aesthetic judgments and ethnographic context, and the role of institutions of art and culture in an increasingly diverse France. Anyone with a stake in the myriad political, cultural, and anthropological issues raised by the MQB will find Price's account fascinating.

Redraws the contours of Asian American art, attempting to free it from a categorization that stifles more than it reveals. Charting its historical conditions and the expansive contexts of its emergence, Susette Min challenges the notion of Asian American art as a site of reconciliation or as a way for marginalized artists to enter into the canon or mainstream art scene. Pressing critically on the politics of visibility and how this categorization reduces artworks by Asian American artists within narrow parameters of interpretation, Unnamable reconceives Asian American art not as a subset of objects, but as a medium that disrupts representations and embedded knowledge. By approaching Asian American art in this way, Min refigures the way we see Asian American art as an oppositional practice, less in terms of its aspirations to be seen-its greater visibility-and more in terms of how it models a different way of seeing and encountering the world. Uniquely presented, the chapters are organized thematically as mini-exhibitions, and offer readings of select works by contemporary artists including Tehching Hsieh, Byron Kim, Simon Leung, Mary Lum, and Nikki S. Lee. Min displays a curatorial practice and reading method that conceives of these works not as "exemplary" instances of Asian American art, but as engaged in an aesthetic practice that is open-ended. Ultimately, Unnamable insists that in order to reassess Asian American art and its place in art history, we need to let go not only of established viewing practices, but potentially even the category of Asian American art itself.

Yuri Lotman (1922-1993) was one of the most prominent and influential scholars of the twentieth century working in the Soviet Union. A co-founder of the Tartu-Moscow school of semiotics, he applied his mind to a wide array of disciplines, from aesthetics to literary and cultural history, narrative theory to intellectual history, cinema to mythology. This collection provides a stand-alone primer to his intellectual legacy in both semiotics and cultural history. It includes new translations of some of his major pieces as well as works that have never been published in English. The collection brings Lotman into the orbit of contemporary concerns such as gender, memory, performance, world literature, and urban life. It is aimed at students from various disciplines and is augmented by an introduction and notes that elucidate the relevant contexts.

You are girlish, our images tell us. You are plastic. Girlhood and the Plastic Image explains how, revealing the increasing girlishness of contemporary media. The figure of the girl has long been prized for its mutability, for the assumed instability and flexibility of the not-yet-woman. The plasticity of girlish identity has met its match in the plastic world of digital art and cinema. A richly satisfying interdisciplinary study showing girlish transformation to be a widespread condition of mediation, Girlhood and the Plastic Image explores how and why our images promise us the adaptability of youth.
This original and engaging study will appeal to a broad interdisciplinary audience including scholars of media studies, film studies, art history, and women's studies.

Christianity, Art and Transformation explores the historical and contemporary relationship between the arts and Christianity with reference to the transformation of society. Several major themes are discussed, among them the power of images, the relationship between aesthetics and ethics, the nature of beauty and its redemptive capacity, aesthetic existence and Christian discipleship, and the role of art in the public square and in the life of the Church. The book is a contribution to the study of theological aesthetics from both an ecumenical and Reformed perspective, global in its scope yet rooted in the author's South African context.

How museums' visual culture contributes to knowledge accumulation Sarita See argues that collections of stolen artifacts form the foundation of American knowledge production. Nowhere can we appreciate more easily the triple forces of knowledge accumulation-capitalist, colonial, and racial-than in the imperial museum, where the objects of accumulation remain materially, visibly preserved. The Filipino Primitive takes Karl Marx's concept of "primitive accumulation," usually conceived of as an economic process for the acquisition of land and the extraction of labor, and argues that we also must understand it as a project of knowledge accumulation. Taking us through the Philippine collections at the University of Michigan Natural History Museum and the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum, also in Michigan, See reveals these exhibits as both allegory and real case of the primitive accumulation that subtends imperial American knowledge, just as the extraction of Filipino labor contributes to American capitalist colonialism. With this understanding of the Filipino foundations of the American drive toward power and knowledge, we can appreciate the value of Filipino American cultural producers like Carlos Bulosan, Stephanie Syjuco, and Ma-Yi Theater Company who have created incisive parodies of this accumulative epistemology, even as they articulate powerful alternative, anti-accumulative social ecologies.

The magisterial two volume set of books with a foreword by Joko Widodo, the President of Indonesia, is the standard work on an ancient Balinese artform that has fascinated the outside world since the early 20th century. Richly illustrated with more than onethousand images, it represents the fruit of more than four years of dedicated work by a team of experts including photographer Doddy Obenk and designer Ni Luh Ketut Sukarniasih who have diligently researched archives and collections around the world. The main texts consist of an essay by I Made Bandem, a renowned Balinese dancer and scholar, on still living dancing traditions. This is supplemented by a detailed history, written by Bruce W. Carpenter, tracing back the origins of this remarkable performance art to the pre-Hindu era. Other texts concern sacred never before photographed masks and biographies of famous mask makers and dancers. The gallery, a separate volume is 360 pages in length. It is an illustrated compendium of Balinese masks from the 16th to 20th century sourced from great museum, institutional, private and temple collections with extensive captions and supplementary information. This book is not only for scholars or those specialized in Balinese studies but also a general audience including those interested in international performing arts, sculpture, Asian art and history.

In postrevolutionary Russia, as the Soviet government pursued rapid industrialization, avant-garde artists declared their intent to serve the nascent state and to transform life in accordance with their aesthetic designs. Despite their utilitarian intentions, however, most avant-gardists rarely created works regarded as practical instruments of societal transformation. Exploring this paradox, Vaingurt claims that the artists' fusion of technology and aesthetics prevented their creations from being fully conscripted into the arsenal of political hegemony. The purposes of avant-garde technologies, she contends, are contemplative rather than constructive. Looking at Meyerhold's theater, Tatlin's and Khlebnikov's architectural designs, Mayakovsky's writings, and other works from the period, Vaingurt offers an innovative reading of an exceptionally complex moment in the formation of Soviet culture.

In this book, leading art experts, art historians, and critics review the life, career, and artistic development of New York based Chinese artist Zhang Hongtu. A pioneer in contemporary Chinese art, Zhang created the first example of "China Pop" art, and his oeuvre is as diverse, intellectually complex, and engaging as it is entertaining. From painting and sculpture to computer generated works and multimedia projects, Zhang's art is equally rich in terms of China's history and its current events, containing profound reflections on China's oldest cultural habits and contemporary preoccupations. He provides a model of cross-cultural interaction designed to make Asian and Western audiences look more closely at each other and at themselves to recognize the beliefs they hold and the unexamined values they adhere to. From his early work in China during the Cultural Revolution to his decades as an artist in New York, Zhang reflects the complex attitudes of a scholar-artist toward modernity, as well as toward Asian and Western societies and himself. Placing Zhang in the context of his cultural milieu both in China and in the Chinese immigrant artist community in America, this volume's contributors examine his adaptations of classic art to reflect a contemporary sensibility, his relation to Cubism and Social Realism, his collaboration with the celebrated fashion designer Vivienne Tam, and his visual critique of China's current environmental crisis. Zhang's work will be on display at the Queens Museum in New York City from October 17, 2015 to March 6, 2016. Contributors: Julia F. Andrews, Alexandra Chang, Tom Finkelpearl, Michael Fitzgerald, Wu Hung, Luchia Meihua Lee, Morgan Perkins, Kui Yi Shen, Jerome Silbergeld, Eugenie Tsai, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, Lilly Wei Co-published by the Queens Museum and Duke University Press.

An introduction to the key Christian themes, signs, and symbols found in art, from the devotional works of the Medieval and Renaissance periods, to the co-existence, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, of the deliberately controversial and the consciously devotional.

Starting in the mid-1960s, a group of Korean artists began to push paint, soak canvas, drag pencils, rip paper, and otherwise manipulate the materials of painting in ways that prompted critics to describe their actions as "methods" rather than artworks. A crucial artistic movement of twentieth-century Korea, Tansaekhwa (monochromatic painting) also became one of its most famous and successful. Promoted in Seoul, Tokyo, and Paris, Tansaekhwa grew to be the international face of contemporary Korean art and a cornerstone of contemporary Asian art. In this full-color, richly illustrated account-the first of its kind in English-Joan Kee provides a fresh interpretation of the movement's emergence and meaning that sheds new light on the history of abstraction, twentieth-century Asian art, and contemporary art in general. Combining close readings, archival research, and interviews with leading Tansaekhwa artists, Kee focuses on an essential but often overlooked dimension of the movement: how artists made a case for abstraction as a way for viewers to engage productively with the world and its systems. As Kee shows, artists such as Lee Ufan, Park Seobo, Kwon Young-woo, Yun Hyongkeun, and Ha Chonghyun urgently stressed certain fundamentals, recognizing that overwhelming forces such as decolonization, authoritarianism, and the rise of a new postwar internationalism could be approached through highly individual experiences that challenged viewers to consider how they understood their world rather than why. Against the backdrop of the Cold War, decolonization, and the declaration of martial law in South Korea, these artists asked questions that continue to resonate today: In what ways can art matter to the world? How does art exert agency when its viewers live in times of explicit or implicit duress? How can specific social and political conditions inspire or influence methods and styles?

In today's art world many strange, even shocking, things qualify as art. In this Very Short Introduction Cynthia Freeland explains why innovation and controversy are valued in the arts, weaving together philosophy and art theory with many fascinating examples. She discusses blood, beauty, culture, money, museums, sex, and politics, clarifying contemporary and historical accounts of the nature, function, and interpretation of the arts. Freeland also propels us into the future by surveying cutting-edge web sites, alongside the latest research on the brain's role in perceiving art. This clear, provocative book engages with the big debates surrounding our responses to art and is an invaluable introduction to anyone interested in thinking about art. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Overall Winner of the 2019 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture explores Caribbean identity through photography, criticism, and personal narrative. Taking a sophisticated and unapologetically subjective Caribbean point of view, the author delves into Mas-a key feature of Trinidad performance-as an emancipatory practice. The photographs and essays here immerse the viewer in carnival experience as never before. Kevin Adonis Browne divulges how performers are or wish to be perceived, along with how, as the photographer, he is implicated in that dynamic. The resulting interplay encourages an informed, nuanced approach to the imaging of contemporary Caribbeanness. The first series, ""Seeing Blue,"" features Blue Devils from the village of Paramin, whose performances signify an important revision of the post-emancipation tradition of Jab Molassie (Molasses Devil) in Trinidad. The second series, ""La Femme des Revenants,"" chronicles the debut performance of Tracey Sankar's La Diablesse, which reintroduced the ""Caribbean femme fatale"" to a new audience. The third series, ""Moko Jumbies of the South,"" looks at Stephanie Kanhai and Jonadiah Gonzales, a pair of stilt-walkers from the performance group Touch de Sky from San Fernando in southern Trinidad. ""Jouvay Reprised,"" the fourth series, follows the political activist group Jouvay Ayiti performing a Mas in the streets of Port of Spain on Emancipation Day in 2015. Troubling the borders that persist between performer and audience, embodiment and spirituality, culture and self-consciousness, the book interrogates what audiences understand about the role of the participant-observer in public contexts. The book probes the multiple dimensions of vernacular experience, representing the uneasy embrace of tradition; the reappropriation of complementary cultural expressions; and, through Mas performance, suggests an explicit refusal to fully submit to the lingering traumas of slavery, colonialism, and the myth of independence.

A remarkable new book providing unique insight into Tate's collection through the depiction of plants and flowers With their delightful colors, incredible natural beauty, and fascinating "otherness," it is no surprise that flowers and plants have long captivated artists. They have come to symbolize a gamut of complex human emotions, including hope, delight, love, compassion, gratitude, grief, and loss. The fragility of flowers is a poignant reminder of the fleeting nature of life. Their sensory appeal--to our sight, smell, touch and even, sometimes, taste--brings us into the present moment, and they can affect our well-being in surprisingly healing ways. Bloom is a compendium of 100 of the most beautiful floral works from Tate's collection. Designed to encourage slow, mindful looking, it will bring reflection, restoration, and joy.